Have you ever felt trapped by self-doubt, negative inner voices, or the constant pursuit of self-improvement? In this thought-provoking conversation, Jonathan sits down with Joe Hudson, the “coach behind Silicon Valley’s unicorn CEOs,” to explore a radically different approach to personal growth and fulfillment.
Imagine if, instead of battling your emotions or striving for an elusive future ideal, you could embrace all aspects of your present experience with curiosity and compassion. Joe Hudson’s unique perspective on humility invites you to let go of the need to think less of yourself and instead think of yourself less. By taking your “God-given place in the world” and following the callings that emerge moment-to-moment, you can unlock a profound sense of authenticity and freedom.
In this insightful dialogue, you’ll discover:
- The counterintuitive path to genuine humility that creates space for your full humanity
- Powerful practices for allowing and even welcoming difficult emotions without resistance
- How to hold goals and visions lightly, remaining open to life’s surprising solutions
- The liberating shift from self-improvement to radical self-discovery and self-understanding
- Redefining “a good life” as the courageous pursuit of your ever-evolving authentic calling
If you’re ready to break free from the cycle of self-judgment and embrace a more curious, compassionate way of being, this conversation offers a refreshing and transformative perspective.
You can find Joe at: Website | The Art of Accomplishment podcast | Emotional Inquiry exerciseΒ |Episode Transcript
If you LOVED this episode:
- Youβll also love the conversations we had with Brené Brown about vulnerability, courage, and leadership transformation.
Check out our offerings & partners:Β
- Join My New Writing Project: Awake at the Wheel
- Visit Our Sponsor Page For Great Resources & Discount Codes
photo credit: Cat Ganson
_____________________________________________________________________________________________________
Episode Transcript:
Jonathan Fields: [00:00:00] So from our earliest days, we’re taught to be humble. Humility is good, we’re told. But what if it wasn’t? Or what if humility had its place, but it also came with a potential dark side, one that potentially caused both us and those around us harm. This is one of the rich topics that I explore in today’s conversation with Joe Hudson, a co-founder of the Art of Accomplishment, sought after teacher and a legendary coach to CEOs and top leaders at companies like OpenAI, alphabet, Apple, and so many others. Joe has this extraordinary ability to help you see what’s been invisible in your life, to break free from self-limiting patterns and live with greater freedom and fulfillment. It’s kind of like he’s that one friend who sees past the shields, even the ones you don’t realize that you put up, then helps you lower them, see what’s real, and walk back into a life that feels so much more connected and alive. In this thought provoking In conversation, we drop into a profoundly liberating perspective on humility and authenticity, one that just might challenge us to let go of the need to think less of ourselves and instead think of ourselves less fully occupying our place in the world without having to shrink, to make others feel comfortable or conform to some dysfunctional norms. Joe also shares some eye opening insights on allowing and even welcoming difficult emotions without resistance. On holding goals lightly to remain open to life’s surprising solutions and the transformative shift of self-improvement to radical self-discovery. So excited to share this conversation with you. I’m Jonathan Fields and this is Good Life Project.
Jonathan Fields: [00:01:48] It’s fun to be hanging out with a new friend. Um, you and I spent some time in the mountains yesterday. Yeah, hiking around, really enjoying ourselves. And, um, as we were talking, we were kind of going along and chatting a little bit about what we might chat about today. And you teed up something that’s been on your mind for a while now that I know you haven’t really shared a whole lot about. Yeah. Recently, it’s this sort of like thoughts around the notion of humility. And before I try and even describe what we were diving into, I’m going to turn it over to you, because it’s not what I expected within the first 30s or so of you speaking. Right. And we’re going to dive into this. So take me there.
Joe Hudson: [00:02:31] I think the original thought process, in humility for people and for me in my experiences, humility is thinking less of yourself. And and then somewhere along the line, there’s this idea that came into my that it’s not thinking less of myself, but it’s thinking of myself less. Like just literally less thoughts about myself. And now in my journey, what’s happening is. This phrase was taught to me, and I think it’s from the I think it’s from the Jewish tradition that humility is. I think the quote is like taking your God given place in the world. And and that’s been really hitting me deeply right now in my own journey of there’s a calling and you follow the calling, even if it takes you somewhere big or small, significant or insignificant. And to actually have the moment of recognition that you hear the call and if you don’t follow it, that it ends in pain. And if you do follow it, even if it’s not particularly the thing that you want to be doing, that it always ends up in some place where you needed to go, some place that other people need you to go needs not quite the right word, but something like that.
Jonathan Fields: [00:03:58] So, I mean, it’s so many curiosities on this one. So when most people think about humility, me included. Yeah, right. The thing that comes to mind is almost the exact opposite of something like a calling of rising up, of saying, I’m here, I to do this thing. And it’s also I own it, right? You know, like there’s some ownership of the process, the experience and the outcome. You know, this steps into a place where when most people think of humility, or at least me.
Joe Hudson: [00:04:28] Yeah.
Jonathan Fields: [00:04:29] I think of the opposite. I think of the pulling back the oh, well, you know, it wasn’t me. It was something channeling through me. It was everyone who came before me. So it’s a very it’s a bit of a contrarian take on the concept.
Joe Hudson: [00:04:43] Yeah. I think that the reason I, I said it in the order I did is because I do think it is a order of operations thing. I think that there’s a really important time to recognize that you’re not responsible. So, for instance, the way we think about ego typically is somebody who’s like, I can do anything that’s like big ego, right? You’ve got a big ego. But the way I think about ego is ego is anything that you use to define yourself in a limited way. And so a lot of people can take an insult better than they can take a compliment. So you can say to somebody, oh, you didn’t do that right. Okay, well what can I do about it? But if you say, wow, you just changed my life. They’re like, yeah, no, that’s okay. It wasn’t just me. There’s this.
Jonathan Fields: [00:05:28] I’m raising my hand over here. Yeah, 100%.
Joe Hudson: [00:05:31] And if you actually let that through, if you actually let a compliment through and you don’t call the other person a liar, which is basically what you’re doing when you’re saying, no, no, no, it wasn’t. That’s not true. If you actually let that all the way through, it’s in our coursework. I see it all the time. Is that that it dissolves people’s ego. It opens up so much energy for their system. But there is a recognition of doing both things. So, for instance, this morning I was on a call with some of the people I’ve been working with for a long time, and we were doing this exercise of letting compliments in, and we were looking at different ways to block the compliments. And one of them was deflection. One of the ways to block a compliment was deflection. So somebody gave me the compliment. My job was to deflect. And they’re like, your work has changed my life. And my deflection was it wasn’t just me. It was like all the teachers before me. And as soon as he heard that, he saw, oh, that can be both a recognition of something greater than you, which is lovely, but it can also be a deflection. For instance, if I look at any thought that I’ve ever had, I didn’t choose any of them. I never said, I’m going to choose to have this thought. And then I had the thought, yet I called them mine. I don’t call them gifts. I don’t call them something beyond my control. And the recognition that they are is a really important recognition, because it allows you to not be so in control or so responsible. There’s also a really important moment where you realize, oh, I have choice. I can control my destiny, and I can choose to not have those kinds of thoughts, you know? So both of them are really necessary. The way that I think about it is if a hand is always like this, our hand is always like this.
Jonathan Fields: [00:07:24] For those who are listening, Joe just started with a closed fist and then open palm.
Joe Hudson: [00:07:28] Yeah, both of them. If they’re always like that, they’re cripple. And so you really want that flexibility. And so there is a way to deflect humility. There’s a way to not be humble in the it was all me. And there’s a way of not being humble in the really had nothing to do with me Because if you actually allow it in that it does have something to do with you. There’s a heartbreak, a love that has to be accepted, there’s an ego destruction that has to be allowed if you’re going to really let it in.
Jonathan Fields: [00:07:59] I mean, it’s interesting also, right? Because when you deflect, you’re essentially denying the person who might be offering you some praise, some compliment, or maybe thanks. Yeah. You’re denying them the feeling of it landing. Yeah. Like. And that’s a gift for someone. I mean, like Adam Grant talks about this. There’s all this research on what’s commonly called the givers glow, right? Yeah. You know, like, we actually get a hit when we. When we’re generous, when we’re kind, when we whether we see something we give something or whatever it may be. And when you, when you deflect, you don’t allow that to land. It’s almost like we’re unintentionally doing, like, a little bit of micro harm to the person who’s trying to be kind to us.
Joe Hudson: [00:08:40] Yeah. So while we were doing this exercise with the five forms of resisting that complement. We have these five forms. And while we were doing it, I noticed I wanted to start giving backhanded compliments. I wanted to start like not giving compliments, because what’s happening there is like there’s people who really want to be seen, really want to be appreciated, and they’re not getting it. But every time they get it, they don’t let it in. They’re deflecting it. So people don’t want to continue to give it to them. And so it’s it’s beyond just hurting them. It’s hurting yourself because you’re setting up an ecosystem where people aren’t going to see you or acknowledge you or give you those compliments. And so it’s a it’s a double harm that happens and it makes people a little pissed, you know, hey, I just gave you a compliment and you’re just and you’re spitting on it and a gentle spit, but it’s a spit, you know?
Jonathan Fields: [00:09:35] Yeah. I mean, we’re wired in such weird ways around this stuff because there’s, like, a social code.
Joe Hudson: [00:09:41] Yeah.
Jonathan Fields: [00:09:42] That says, well, we’re not we’re kind of like supposed to answer that way in a way like that’s, you know, like and especially in different cultures, you know, Australians tall poppy syndrome, you know, it’s like there’s certain that it changes by culture too, right? And even family culture, you know, local culture, whatever it may be, it’s going to change. And then as you’re describing this, I’m remembering, I think it was Snoop Dogg who was like receiving like a maybe a Grammy or something like that. And he got up or maybe it was like MTV music, whatever it may have been. Yeah. I was like, I would like to thank me. I mean, it goes through all the reasons why he wants to thank, like his younger self effectively for not giving up, for not listening to this and all this stuff and for and. Yeah, and it’s like the exact opposite. It’s just like, not only am I going to let it land, I’m going to give it to myself and then let it land. Um, yeah. But your subtler point about there’s a difference between having a given to you and receiving it is key and I meditate every morning and towards the very end. I always just do like a little micro version of a metta meditation. Like, yeah, I’ll say yeah. Um, yeah. May you live with ease, may you be safe, may you be healthy. May you feel loved. And the reason I don’t say may you be loved is because you may be loved.
Joe Hudson: [00:11:03] Yeah.
Jonathan Fields: [00:11:03] But if you’re not allowing it to land, it kind of doesn’t matter.
Joe Hudson: [00:11:08] Yeah. So yeah, two things on that. So the the first one that hits me is you are being loved. Like if you actually just pay attention. My experience of reality now is that like, the whole universe is trying to love me and waiting for me to let my heart crack open enough to to acknowledge that that’s what’s happening. And when I really look at, you know, now working with tens of thousands of people. I could almost boil it all down to. So much pain is just the fact that people aren’t letting the love in. So that’s one aspect. The other aspect that happens is one of the things our mind says if we let in the compliment or if we’re if we’re letting ourselves be the tall poppy, one of the things is that we’re scared that we’re going to use that power to hurt people. And so part of my job is to work with really powerful people. And what I notice is that if a really powerful person hasn’t let in the fact that they have done this, that they are powerful, that they are capable to really actually fully let it in, then they’re far more likely to get dangerous. Hmm.
Jonathan Fields: [00:12:25] Take me deeper into that.
Joe Hudson: [00:12:27] Yeah. So, you know, you could take, you know, a famous person who’s incredibly rich, really successful, and yet they’re lying about video games, about like how good they are in video games. As an example. So like what? What is that? What’s going on there? And it’s because they’re trying to feed a hungry ghost that they’re enough, that they’re capable, that they’re deserving of love. They’re trying to fill that ghost. But every time they’re fed, they’re not digesting it. They’re chewing it and spitting it out because they’re not receiving the compliment. They’re not actually acknowledging God’s intended place for them. And so they’ll think that it’s a better place, maybe to protect themselves, or they’ll think they haven’t done enough yet. They’re still catching up at 40. There’s all sorts of ways in which the, you know, the mind plays a game, but all of it is not actually the acknowledgement of this is what’s up, this is what’s real. I have created $1 billion business. I am creating a technology that will change the world, and not very many people could do it.
Jonathan Fields: [00:13:35] And meanwhile, from the outside looking in, everything is astonishing. But the ghost is getting hungrier and hungrier.
Joe Hudson: [00:13:43] Hungrier and hungrier and starving. Exactly. So they have to do more and more to prove to themselves that they’re valuable, or that they have control, or that they have influence. And it becomes incredibly destructive. And it’s very. It’s hard for a lot of my clients because most clients who want to work with me aren’t, you know, in the part of their cycle where they’re saying, you know, I’m not good enough. I got to drive there. And the people saying, no, I got to be really humble to protect not becoming that other person that I see. And then for them to realize, oh, this is part of doing the actual humble thing, is to acknowledge it in a way that breaks your heart. And that’s the thing is, you can acknowledge it. And with a deflection. Yeah, I’m a I’m a world class teacher. Nobody can coach as good as me or I’m one of the top 1% coaches. And that’s all. Like the way I’m doing that is deflection, because I’m not letting it break my heart. I’m not acknowledging that there is also a gift in this that is not within my control. And so it’s really both of those two things. It’s allowing both the personal and the non-personal and at the same time, which creates real humility, because if you can dismiss it all, your ghost is still hungry. If you can’t dismiss any of it, if you can’t say it is all a gift and I am incredibly fortunate, or that life is a dream come true that I never thought possible, both of those things are necessary for the heartbreak, which is the disintegration of the ego.
Jonathan Fields: [00:15:13] So take me into the heartbreak side of this. How do we allow it to right our hearts?
Joe Hudson: [00:15:20] Yeah. So first, just most people resist this idea of heartbreak like, oh, I don’t want my heart to be broken.
Jonathan Fields: [00:15:27] My experience is we run from that experience. We don’t want to.
Joe Hudson: [00:15:29] Feel all the time, right. What we’re actually so it’s heart break is heart breaking open. And so what it’s it’s literally saying, okay, I have to expand my my ability to love has to expand to include this thing. Right. I should work out more. I’m chubby. Can I love that? How much does my heart have to break open, to expand? To love that? To love both the fact that I’m chubby and also to expand. To love the thing that’s saying that I’m chubby and that requires just a like a crack in your system to do it. As a matter of fact, I’m sure somebody listening to that like, I can’t I can’t love that voice. What do you mean?
Jonathan Fields: [00:16:14] I’m sure a lot of people are listening to this and say like, dude, now you just totally lost me, right? It’s like literally my voice has been in my head and I’ve been doing everything I can for all the waking hours of my life to try and snuff it out. Yeah, I’ve been going to therapy to change its mind. I’ve been trying to extinguish it because that is the voice of harm is the way a lot of people.
Joe Hudson: [00:16:33] Absolutely. Yeah. And it is. They’re not wrong about it. However, that which you resist persists. And all of what you just described is resistance. And it absolutely some of it might be necessary actually, because again, this is an order of operations thing. And I’ll go into that in a second. But at the end of the day, yeah, you’ve been doing all that all that stuff for 20 years. And guess what? It’s still there. So you’re just doing the crazy thing by repeating something that doesn’t work. Um, my experience is that so. I mean, we have this week long thing that we do, which is all about changing the negative voice in your head. And we get like a standard deviation change in the positive direction, less negative self-talk. And we’ve looked at lots and lots of exercises and experiments that one can run. My experience is curiosity far more powerful than management. What makes it say it that way? How does it feel in my system? What’s the somatic response? What’s it’s really good intention behind it. What makes it manage me like an idiot? What makes it manage me good. And sometimes. And not good. You know, there’s so many questions. And to really actually be attuned and listening to it, that’s. That’s one thing that really helps. At some point, you have to get really angry at it, because it’s really hard to love something that you feel dominates you or that you feels oppresses you. If you have the feeling that something oppresses you, then it’s really hard to learn to love that.
Joe Hudson: [00:18:09] But once you realize, like, oh, you have choice, you can dominate and not pay attention to it. Then there’s this, this space for love to occur. But the biggest trick is just how you respond to it. And so I’ll give you a simple we could do this right now if you want, but you if somebody just closes their eyes and listens to the negative self-talk, and every time it says something that’s mean or that that you wouldn’t say to somebody else or that you wouldn’t say to somebody you love and your response is, ouch. Just sit there. Sit there for 20 minutes and just say, ouch. Every time it says something. And what you’ll notice is it just gets quieter and quieter and quieter. Or you can say things like, oh, I see that you’re really scared and I’m right here with you. I’m not leaving you every time the voice says something. So there’s a thousand experiments that you can run about. How am I going to respond to the voice in the head? And what you notice is the way that you respond to it, just like the way I respond to you creates a different relationship. If I yell at you every time, we’re, you know, we’re on a podcast, you’re we’re having a different relationship than if I’m. And so it’s the same thing with the negative self-talk.
Jonathan Fields: [00:19:22] So? So if you have a thought that comes into your head, let’s relate it back to humility. Somebody like like you did an incredible job with this project that you’re working on. Yeah, right. My immediate response to them is, yeah, well, it was just the team. Like, I literally just did, like what I needed to do. It’s just. And then the self-talk that’s going on in my head immediately is you’re really incompetent. You’re riding on the coattails of everybody else who made this happen, right? And you have no business being here, right? Yeah. Right. So and that’s a voice that a lot of people have. Yeah. Right. So your your invitations are. What if you just sat there, let the voice in, and every time you said that to you. Ouch. Ouch. That hurts. Yeah. Give me some other. Yeah. Ways to respond to curiosity.
Joe Hudson: [00:20:08] I see how scared you are. And I’m right here with you. Uh, you’re absolutely right. You’re totally, totally I. I cannot deny that I’m riding on the coattails of others. And I don’t belong to be here. That it’s all a gift. I’m with you. Or. Hey, how would it be to manage me a little bit differently or go fuck yourself? I don’t care. Like the modality is on Monday. I’m going to try to respond to it and I’m going to try this experiment. I’m going to respond to it in this way and see how it reacts. It’s all about wonder. Still on Tuesday. I’m going to react to it this way. I’m just running experiments with it. I’m learning to understand it. The thing about negative self-talk generally it does self-improvement rather than self awareness. Self-discovery and self-improvement is a lot less effective than self discovery. So we’ve all been telling ourselves we should be doing something for a decade that we haven’t been doing it. We’ve all been telling ourselves, here’s all the things that I have to do to improve that haven’t improved, rather than being in self self-discovery, actually trying to understand ourselves deeply. And when you really understand yourself deeply, it just changes the same way that once I understand how to talk into a microphone, I speak into a microphone differently. The way that once I understand a camera, I don’t need to tell myself to be a better cameraman. You know? I just understand the camera. And it’s the same thing with ourselves. We think that self-abuse is the way to have a better relationship with ourselves, but it’s actually self-understanding. And we have all these fears of, oh, if I if I give up the self-abuse, I’m just going to lie on the couch and drink beer and I’m not going to do anything. But what actually happens is you have all this freedom, all this free energy, because you’re not working against yourself all the time. You know, you look at a three year old, they do not have negative self-talk. And yet that doesn’t usually happen until 7 or 8. And yet they do all sorts of stuff. They learn all sorts of stuff. They learn so much more in a year than we ever learned because they’re not fighting against themselves. Mhm.
Jonathan Fields: [00:22:26] And we’ll be right back after a word from our sponsors. I mean, the notion of elevating self-discovery over self-improvement intuitively lands with me. Yeah. It’s also it’s more interesting to me in a weird way.
Joe Hudson: [00:22:42] Totally.
Jonathan Fields: [00:22:43] Like I feel like we’ve, like so many of us, spend our waking hours trying to like, in the process of fixing everything that we perceive has been wrong. Yeah. Entire lives.
Joe Hudson: [00:22:52] Yeah.
Jonathan Fields: [00:22:52] That’s right. You know, some people and, you know, profoundly different levels. And, um, but it’s almost like the entirety of our lives. It’s like just just incremental pursuit of improvement towards some sort of end where like, oh, like we made it. We finally feel good with ourselves. We’ve got x, Y or Z, you know? Yeah. Um. Rather than, you know, your invitation, which is like, what if you kind of let go of that and, and maybe if somebody’s watching, listening to this like, yeah. No. Like there’s things I want to work towards, the things I want to change about myself. There’s things I want to accomplish or achieve. Right. Okay. Maybe if we say suspended, just just for a window. Yeah. Like what would happen using your approach? Which is so I mean, we’ve talked about it. We both are true believers in experimenting your way to things rather than trying to think them through. You know what? If just an experiment, you didn’t let go of that for life.
Joe Hudson: [00:23:52] Yeah.
Jonathan Fields: [00:23:53] But for for a moment.
Joe Hudson: [00:23:55] Yeah.
Jonathan Fields: [00:23:56] For a little window.
Joe Hudson: [00:23:59] How about like, right now because the so for instance, the ideas, there’s something wrong with you. But if you take this moment and you don’t go into the past for evidence and you don’t go into the future for evidence. I could only find evidence in this moment right now. What is essentially wrong with you? And I’m asking you, but I’m asking anybody who’s listening. Like, if you do not go to the past or the future, if there’s something wrong with you, it would be wrong right now. And yet, if you look at what’s essentially what is essentially wrong with you right now, there’s never an answer.
Jonathan Fields: [00:24:38] But what if there is?
Joe Hudson: [00:24:39] Give me an example.
Jonathan Fields: [00:24:41] Um, what if somebody, um, is sitting here now and they’ve just heard this question they’re asking themselves? Okay. So, um, well, like in this moment, not in the past, not in the future. Like what? What is wrong with me in this moment? Well, um, I have incredible back pain.
Joe Hudson: [00:25:03] Yeah. And how is that make you essentially wrong? Since it’s essentially.
Jonathan Fields: [00:25:12] Okay.
Joe Hudson: [00:25:13] So yes, there’s discomfort in this moment for sure.
Jonathan Fields: [00:25:16] So let’s tease that out a little bit more. Yeah. Because I think that can get confusing.
Joe Hudson: [00:25:20] Yeah. You have back pain but that’s not you. You is the thing that you’ve been ever since the moment you came into existence until now. If it’s not that, it’s not you. If it hasn’t had to existed through the whole thing. Right. I have a thought. It comes and goes. That’s not me. That’s a thought. I get cut off my arm. I’m still here, so it’s not my arm. It’s like, what are you essentially is the question. So yes, I can have a sensation. You know, I could even say, hey, the problem is, right now I want to kill myself. And I would say, that’s future. And that’s something like what’s right now.
Jonathan Fields: [00:26:08] So take me deeper into how this helps. Because there’s going to be a thought bubble or listening in on this and also say, okay, so interesting experiment. Yeah. Um, maybe even interesting more broadly, say like, what if I just spent time really discovering rather than trying to fix? Yeah. Um, but if I do believe that there’s something broken or if I’m dealing with a struggle or a circumstance that I do want to be different. Yeah. How does reallocating my energy to discovery, rather than change, make me feel the way I want to feel?
Joe Hudson: [00:26:43] Yeah. So there’s a there are a whole bunch in that. There’s a whole bunch of that. So the the first piece is. Evolution happens whether you’re telling yourself you have to improve or not. An oak tree evolves. When is it perfect? When is it good and when is an oak tree good enough? When it’s an acorn or when it’s a sapling, or when it’s 100 years old, or when it’s 200 years old. When is it good enough? But yet evolution continues. So in the question, there’s this assumption that I have to tell myself I have to improve for evolution to occur rather than evolution just occurs. A three year old doesn’t have to tell themselves, I gotta, I gotta improve, I gotta improve. And yet when we hold, evolution occurs. So that’s the first piece of it. Second piece is how do I feel? The way I want to feel is another big postulate in there, which is my question. Response is how do you enjoy feeling whatever you’re feeling? So I once sat with, uh, one of my teachers. His name was Adyashanti. His name is Ari Asante. He doesn’t teach anymore. And and I was telling him what we were doing in our work. What’s happening? We hadn’t seen each other in years, and we were having dinner somewhere. And his wife and my wife and and I said, he said, what’s your work? I said, a lot of our work is going from emotional management to emotional clarity, which is the loving acceptance of your emotional experiences without the resistance.
Joe Hudson: [00:28:19] And so we’re talking about one of those things, which is to allow the compliment, that feeling of joy in, but it’s feeling of anger. And he said, and he was a meditation, non-dual meditation teacher, and he said, that’s 90% of the questions I get. How do I feel this way? How do I stop feeling this way? And that never leads anywhere good. Instead it’s like, oh, how, how, how can I be excited to feel sad? How can I be excited to feel heartbreak? How can I be excited to feel angry? That doesn’t mean that I am taken over by it. It doesn’t mean that I’ve lost myself in it. But it’s it’s that. So your question was if I want to feel a certain way And you’re going to feel all sorts of ways in a day in the in this podcast, if you’re listening in our conversation, we both have had 100 feelings. Whatever it is will come and go. Those emotional experiences will come and go. So I can’t say that. But as far as evolution, as far as us continuing to evolve, that happens. The other thing that’s a supposition, and the question is that there’s something wrong, that somehow I have to be better, to be good enough to be lovable to rather than, oh, I’m perfect as an acorn, perfect as a sapling.
Jonathan Fields: [00:29:41] Yeah. And I wonder partly there’s a there’s a part of this supposition. There also is that delivered in life, we need to feel a certain set of feelings. Right. And not feel a certain set of feelings, or at least maximize a certain set and minimize or try and extinguish a certain set, rather than saying, you know what, if a good life is allowing ourselves to feel the full sweep of emotion? Yeah. And, um, just letting it all in. I was asked recently somebody I was in a conversation and people were asking like, how do you define mental health? I mean, such a loaded question. So maybe it’s a boy. How do you answer that? In a way, you just don’t step in in some way, shape or form. Um, but then they came to me right away was just, you know, for me. And again, like, I’m not going to postulate that this is right for everybody. I said, for me, I think the way I would define it is the capacity to feel everything but not grasp to anything. You know, it’s to like to cry.
Joe Hudson: [00:30:49] Yeah.
Jonathan Fields: [00:30:49] Like when I’m. When I’m heartbroken and to, like, not try and stifle it or feel it to, um, like laugh out loud or on friends and to just to let love land, to feel that gratitude like to, you know, to feel grief, to feel really sad. Yeah. When hard things happen and and not not to to allow it all in. To let it all in. Yeah. Um. And also not to spend my entire life in any of it. Right. Yeah. Um, and but we, like, we have this sort of, like, Western overlay. This is. No, no, that’s that’s not the aspiration. Yeah. Desperation is as much good as possible and as little, quote bad things as possible, which is not possible.
Joe Hudson: [00:31:39] Yeah, yeah. There’s a whole bunch of weird things in that. So the first one is just a neurological thing. Neurologically speaking, a grand majority of our decision making happens in the emotional center of our brain. So it’s not. So therefore clear decision making isn’t being logical. We’re using logic to decide what emotion we’re going to feel. So when a person who has a part of their brain damaged, their IQ stays the same, but it takes them like a half an hour to decide what color pen to use. So if you think about just the clarity of decision making it comes from. I’m happy to feel one way or another way, and therefore I’ll make a decision that’s actually good for me, rather than to feel one way or another way, because so many of our decisions are made to not feel like a failure, or to feel loved, or to feel at peace, or to not feel like a loser. And so. So if you are happy to feel all that stuff, then you make really great decisions, as it turns out. Second thing is, none of the feelings are actually negative or are really actually that uncomfortable. The resistance to them is ungodly Oddly uncomfortable. But if you are. Whoa! I so enjoy feeling sad. Sadness changes. It’s like there’s a pipe. And let’s say let’s use anger. And so there’s this channel of anger. And if it’s kinked one way, it’s nice shirt. And if it’s kinked another way, it’s you son of a blah blah blah, I hate you, blah blah blah. If it’s kinked another way, it’s if you loved me, you would. Those are all kinks in the hose. But when that hose is not resistant, when you’re fully allowing yourself to feel that anger, that anger comes out like Gandhi or Martin Luther King. It comes out with boundary and clarity and dignity. And so it’s the resistance that’s uncomfortable on these all the emotions. It’s the resistance that’s uncomfortable, including the resistance to the compliment. In. The appreciation, if you actually let it in, it’s really pleasant. It tickles. But we’re like, no. It’s not me. It was my teacher. It’s not me, it’s the team.
Joe Hudson: [00:34:06] I have a quote that sums it up really well, which is joy is the matriarch of a family of emotions, and she won’t come into a house where her children aren’t welcome. And that’s my experience, is that when you fully accept all the emotions and love them and can’t look forward to them, welcome them, and joy just happens a lot more often and your ability to feel the joy, it becomes a lot deeper.
Jonathan Fields: [00:34:34] Which begs the question like how do you how do you unkink the hose there? You know, like the and I guess maybe that cycles back to a stance of curiosity.
Joe Hudson: [00:34:46] Wonder is huge. Yeah, yeah, I make a distinction between curiosity and wonder. It’s arbitrary, but curiosity I just define as looking for an answer. Wonder is just being a little kid about it, and I find wonders more effective than curiosity. And yes, lots of wonder expression. Your emotions live in your body. They live in your muscles. Right now. If I said to you, stop feeling you have to constrict a muscle. If you’re going to completely stop feeling, you’re going to constrict a lot of them. That’s why resisting emotions hurts. That’s why that’s the uncomfortable piece.
Jonathan Fields: [00:35:28] Yeah. There’s like a little somatic connection there.
Joe Hudson: [00:35:30] Yeah, exactly.
Jonathan Fields: [00:35:31] Feels like everything’s just tightening up.
Joe Hudson: [00:35:33] So there is an expression that’s necessary and a lot of wonder to really understand the emotional, emotional system. Because we’ve been trained, most of us have been trained our whole life not to feel.
Jonathan Fields: [00:35:47] What’s that about?
Joe Hudson: [00:35:47] Don’t cry. It’s because our parents didn’t want to feel it.
Jonathan Fields: [00:35:52] And their parents.
Joe Hudson: [00:35:53] And their parents and their parents like, oh, if I feel bad, I’m going to open up a bag of whoop ass on my life. So I’m just gonna push that down into this little corner of my body where it will slowly become cancer. Some version of, you know, um, or I’m gonna push down the anger and be passive aggressive. There’s it always ends up leaking out, but it creates a lot of tension in the system. And and the fear is that if I am to really allow myself to be sad, it’ll last forever. If I really allow myself to be angry, it’s going to destroy everything I love. If I really allow myself to be scared, I’m going to be incapable. But it turns out if you really let yourself cry, you feel better. If you really let yourself get angry. Not at anybody. Meaning not not to control anybody, but just have an experience out in the woods getting angry. You feel more love. You feel less like destroying your world. And if you really allow that sensation of fear through your system, you feel very capable. But our brains will tell us that the opposite. Because our brains don’t get emotions. Emotions aren’t logical. Our brains aren’t supposed to get them anything else.
Jonathan Fields: [00:37:04] Like the opposite is true too. Because a lot of times the story we tell us about, quote, positive emotions or the opposite, like, if I really allow myself to be happy, that’s going to end and then I’m going to be miserable. If I really allow myself to love and be loved, they’re going to leave me. I’m something’s going to happen and then it’s going to be devastated. It’s when we let that quote aspirational emotions. Yeah, we tell the opposite story.
Joe Hudson: [00:37:28] That’s right, that’s right. Totally. And so, so well seen. And that’s why typically what I notice when people are in the journey of emotional fluidity, which is what my description for what you just said about allowing yourself to feel all the emotions and not be ruled by them is it’s usually anger, sadness first, some depending. Like men in middle class America, anger is more accessible than their sadness and vice versa. But, um, and you do that and then the fear and then the peace, bliss, joy, love that. It actually happens in that order. Typically, you can’t just jump to the positive things and actually have a full sensation of them.
Jonathan Fields: [00:38:14] So it’s like you have to there’s there’s almost like a pecking order. Yeah, yeah, there has to be laid. And but it also invites us to step into the stuff that we probably struggle with the most.
Joe Hudson: [00:38:24] And it’s because, oh my God, if I really let the love in, I will be hurt, I will be stomped on. And the answer is yeah. And I can’t wait to be stomped on because I have felt that before. I know how much freedom is on the other side of that. I know how much clarity is on the other side of that. If you can find a part of me that gets triggered. I am stoked. Great. Fantastic. Because that’s exactly something I can’t say about myself. That’s exactly the place that wants to evolve. So yeah, it’s I’m very excited about it. I’m excited to get triggered by somebody because it is more freedom for me.
Jonathan Fields: [00:39:06] And we’ll be right back after a word from our sponsors. I want to get into that, but there’s something I don’t want to let go of before we just take that step, which is if so much of this conditioning that says basically don’t feel has been handed down through generations, often by parents or whoever it may be, who’s, yeah, who you want to have a sense of belonging with so you can conform to the norms were that were taught to you, the family norms, the local culture norms, you know. Yeah. Um, part of then saying, okay, so what if I actually start to allow myself to feel what if I get like, what if I allow them to wander around all this stuff, all the feels? Yeah, embedded in that. Wouldn’t there also be a potential? And maybe this is one of the restrictions that stops us from doing it, is that we’re effectively rejecting, um, the, the safety, the container belonging that’s been passed down to us through our, our family or whoever it was. Yeah, that’s right. Where we want to feel safe and we want to belong. We want to be accepted. You have to be seen. And part of that was buying into this notion that, okay, so like you only feel a certain way or you don’t feel that’s how that’s how we belong to each other, right? Yeah.
Joe Hudson: [00:40:22] So yeah.
Jonathan Fields: [00:40:23] Part of like saying, okay, Joe, like I buy into this, I’ll run the experiments. Yeah. It’s also saying, okay Joe I buy into this. Mhm. I’m going to actually reject or be rejected by those people who I really care about and they’re still in my life. Yeah.
Joe Hudson: [00:40:42] That is true. There’s no doubt about it. But you’re already rejected by them.
Jonathan Fields: [00:40:49] Tell me more.
Joe Hudson: [00:40:50] If I get sad, they will reject me. Means they’re rejecting you for who you are. Whether you’re showing them or not. Showing them you’re already living in a relationship where the love is conditional. You can pretend to be something that you’re not by not crying, but then you’re not loved. The thing you’re pretending to be is loved, which is why you feel so unloved in your life. Mhm. Not you particularly, but you know what I mean.
Jonathan Fields: [00:41:16] I mean probably me at certain points and probably almost everybody.
Joe Hudson: [00:41:19] Yeah.
Jonathan Fields: [00:41:20] At certain points and probably a lot of folks right now. Yeah. Um joining us in this conversation, you know, and it’s, it’s that was me for a lot of my life, I, I learned that I could be really good at being a chameleon. Yeah. I could walk into a room and a pretty good social awareness and understand, like the culture of a room. And maybe that’s also a family, right? Or a group of friends or kids or a clique. Yeah. You know, and I could kind of scan the environment and sort of notice, oh, like, this is how I would need to be. Yeah. To quote, fit in. But in my mind it was to belong. Yes. And I would, I would sort of like form myself into that person. And then that, that person like that, I’m thinking to myself, I’m, I’m oh, sweet. I’m, I’m literally I can walk into any of these groups, you know, like this group, this group, this group, this group. And it’s all good. Yeah. And meanwhile, I’m still lonely, right? Because as you’re describing, I’m not actually in any of those rooms.
Joe Hudson: [00:42:21] Yeah. That’s right. Yeah. There’s something there’s something else about it that I find my experience is very similar to you. I used to even dress in a way that I could blend in to as many. I was like, just neutral enough that I could flip into any situation in my 20s. It was a really similar situation. I think that the the other thing about you’re saying that, oh, if I feel a certain way, then I’m going to be rejected in in the society or in this. I have a story about that. My first of all, if you have a young kid and you’re really interested in this, there’s Patty Whiffler has a book called listen, and the organization is called Hand in Hand Parenting so valuable. It’s just amazing work. And I’m doing this, which is basically being with your child is or having an emotion and loving attention without trying to get them out of the emotion. But this time it happens at a Whole Foods. So I’m at a Whole Foods. I got my two and a half year old just raging about wanting potato chips or some such thing I can’t remember. I’m containing her.
Jonathan Fields: [00:43:25] Every parent is like immediately transferring to some public place where they’re that.
Joe Hudson: [00:43:28] Bad.
Jonathan Fields: [00:43:29] Right?
Joe Hudson: [00:43:29] So. But I am committed. I am committed to allowing her to have her emotions and I’m going to be in loving attention of them. So she is having the full thing on the floor. I’m on the floor of this Whole Foods and I’m just like, I’m got you right here with you. I really hear you want the potato chips? Rah rah rah rah rah. And we live in this little hippie town in Northern California. And, uh, it used to be a hippie town, and and and this little old lady hippie comes by and she goes, are you okay? To my daughter. And my daughter’s. Like, rah, rah, rah. I’m just having my emotions. And then she went like, right back into it. And so and yeah, like I didn’t disintegrate. I didn’t get expelled from my town. She didn’t get expelled from her town. That. But the other thing that happens is as emotional fluidity comes as you welcome all of it. There’s a short time where, like if you’re allowing anger for the first time, you’re going to get angry more often. You’re like tears. You’re going to tears more often. But then that arc starts going down all of a sudden, oh my. I feel anger and instead of yelling, oh, I have a boundary! Okay, here’s my boundary, because I feel that I got that little bit of anger and I didn’t repress it. I didn’t think I was bad, I didn’t wonder what did I do wrong because I’m angry. I didn’t wonder what did they do wrong because they’re angry. It’s oh, anger. Oh, boundary. Oh, hey, could we not do this this way? Oh, sadness. Oh, that’s a longing. Can I I’ll express my longing. Oh, fear. There’s something. I’m not taking care of myself. So these things become signals. And so you’re not rolled over by the emotions and then it. And then. And you can get angry. And you don’t have to get angry at anybody. You can go into the woods and get angry. You can get angry in a safe place. And it’s weird because we’re so scared of our emotions. One of the things fear does to the brain is it makes us into binary thinkers. And so we’re scared of our emotions. And it’s either we are going to hold it back or we are going to be taken by it. We are either going to hurt somebody with it, or we are going to hold it back instead of, oh, I can just express it in a way that’s not shame-based and not bad for anybody.
Jonathan Fields: [00:45:55] Mm. Easier said than done.
Joe Hudson: [00:46:00] Yep. Yeah, yeah. No doubt.
Jonathan Fields: [00:46:03] It’s like I can. I have long hair all I want. So you’re like. Well, yeah. Um. Yeah. And then, you know, like, life happens.
Joe Hudson: [00:46:11] Yeah.
Jonathan Fields: [00:46:13] Um. And it’s funny also. Right. Because I think, um, early days of meditation, sort of studying eastern thought, eastern philosophy, you know, I, I think I interpreted a lot of teachings as, you know, not grasping lack of desire. Sort of like like the ultimate, the aspiration and aspiration is to basically, um, not attached to anything which I translate to not feel anything. Yeah.
Joe Hudson: [00:46:39] Yeah. Most people I started meditating, I meditated for whatever, seven years in a room, most of most of my time. And somewhere along the line, I realized I’m not meditating. I am managing myself. I’m. I’m not. I’m not being with what is. I am trying to create what is total pain and suffering. And I thought I was meditating, I was just torturing myself.
Jonathan Fields: [00:47:03] Yeah. I mean, so the invitation is really just like, what if we let it all in? What if instead of and and I guess part of the, the curiosity for me here is like, do we have to let go of the aspiration to, at some future point, want to feel different or want our lives to be different or want something to like, be changed in some meaningful way? Do we have to let go of that? Yeah. And and just focus on like, what if I just allowed it all in right now, in the moment and, and sat there in the place of wonder and said, okay, um, whatever it is I’m experiencing, huh? Yeah. Huh. Um, can we hold both of those simultaneously, or does the future aspiration somehow stop us from doing the work of opening to sensation and feeling? Now, that will maybe at some point actually get us if we want to be right.
Joe Hudson: [00:47:59] So you don’t have to do anything so that the that but that’s typically the way it works is we tell ourselves oh so now I see I’ve heard that. So I have to do this and insane I have to do it. You’re guaranteeing that it’s not going to happen or not. Not going to happen easily. Yeah, exactly. So exactly. So you’re in fear. You’re acting from fear. You learn slower. That’s that’s part of it. Um, There is a nature. Part of the way that we evolve is because we our nature is to evolve. And so of course, we’re going to have thoughts of evolution. I’m I’m most mostly suggesting that the way to it is through wonder rather than through self-abuse or drive. I don’t know how to let go of the call, which is the call to evolve, and I haven’t tried. Don’t have a particular want to try. I don’t see that it’s it’s painful or bad. And I often, however, don’t have a specific outcome in mind. Or I’ll I’ll have the goal, but it’ll be very, very loosely held because my experience is my goal suck compared to what happens. Like I, I did not, in my 20s, say, this is what I want my life to be like. I had a very different vision of my life. I am so grateful that that vision did not happen. That this vision is so much better than I could have imagined. That the solution set that you can come up with from the place that you are now, is not even close to the solution set that you can come up with, with a place where you have learned to love yourself a little bit more, or. Felt more emotional fluidity or any number of things. So I hold the goal because there’s a directionality to it, but I don’t really hold on to that. It’s going to look the way that I want it to look, because life has a way of looking a lot better than my preconceived notions.
Jonathan Fields: [00:50:07] I mean, it’s funny, there’s, um, as you’re describing that, what came to mind for me is I’ve had plenty of conversations with founders, entrepreneurs who are like, this is exactly what I’m going to build. This is what I want to make happen. This is a I have a very clear goal. And there’s all this mythology says if you don’t have, you know, if you don’t know what the target is like, you know, like you’re just never going to do anything that will get you there. Like, you have to be crystal clear about what the end point is. Yeah. And and I’ve often said and there’s data that shows what like okay, so if you do have clarity around that thing, you probably are more likely to actually achieve that thing. And there are different modalities to get there in different methodologies. Yeah. But the point that you’re making, I think is just so prescient, which is a is that thing worth wanting? And B, what about the universe of a bazillion other possibilities? Yeah. That you’re excluding without realizing it by saying this and only this, rather than what if I just allow myself to be really intentional about being and observing and and being in the state of wonder and evolving and letting things in? Yeah. And let that direct me. Like how, you know, I tend to look forward and I’m a maker.
Jonathan Fields: [00:51:23] Like, I just love to make stuff. Yeah. But I do it largely. I’m a weirdo in that. Like, I’ll write a book. I’ll spend two years writing a book. My publisher shifts me a case of books like The First Thing, and it’s like, you know, like a case of, like, 24 hardcover books. Yeah. And I’ll just let it sit there in the box, unopened for a couple of weeks. And I was like, dude, what? Meanwhile, everyone’s doing unboxings online and stuff like this. And I’m like, it was never about, like, the thing. Yeah. For me, it was just about the experience of, like, how cool is it that I’m growing and unfolding and learning? I’m like, um, okay. So like now there’s a thing at the end of it also. Yeah. Um, you know, and but but the whole, the whole idea of being really rigid about exactly how you want your life to unfold and, and working towards the things you want and the things you want to extinguish from it. Yeah. Um, and that may actually get you closer to those things faster. But does that actually. But but even if it does, you know, is that the way you’re going to want to be living when you get there? What have you completely ignored along the way? But having the blinders on. Yeah.
Joe Hudson: [00:52:36] And I mean, if you’ve spoken to that many entrepreneurs and I work with them, how many like hit 45 and they’re like, I got everything I wanted, but I’m fucking miserable. Yeah. Happens all the time. I think that the there is also a huge amount of wisdom to holding a goal. Meaning let’s say I have a goal of reaching a million people. Not my goal, by the way. Um. Or I have a goal of a thousand people. Well, I’m going to ask different questions. How do I reach a thousand people? I can go door to door and knock on 1000 doors. So. But if I’m trying to reach a million, I’m going to have a different. So I think that holding that goal is and having clarity on it is really what makes visionaries and the fact that, um, I define a visionary as somebody who’s living in a world as if it already exists. Gandhi existed as if he was a free man. He existed as if India was free. When they walked onto the salt mines, and it was a half a million Indians and 20 security guards or whatever, it was 100 security guards, and they just walked and got beaten down for at a time. So they were acting like free people. They weren’t acting like like subjects. And, and and so that if you can’t see the reality, you can’t live as if that reality already exists. And so I think that’s the power of it. You also can’t catch the beauty if you’re attached to it. So it’s like having it, having that vision, having that clarity, but also being okay with the fact that life is going to serve up something a lot better if you’re if you’re paying attention.
Jonathan Fields: [00:54:23] Yeah. And there’s the tension, right. It’s sort of like, okay, you get crystal clear about that thing, the vision of like how you want to be or what you want to participate in making happen. Yeah. And at the same time, you know, you got to hold it lightly to a certain extent.
Joe Hudson: [00:54:38] Yeah, exactly. Yeah.
Jonathan Fields: [00:54:39] You know, to allow serendipity to enter the experience. Yeah. And wonder.
Joe Hudson: [00:54:45] Yeah. And that’s where the humility actually is. Yeah. Because if if it’s not you doing it, there’s no vision. And if it’s not a huge gift, then you’re not actually you you’re not seeing the serendipity. And so to actually take your God given place in the world and that is it requires you to both see the serendipity, which is a humility of this is beyond me and walk into it, which is a humility of this is personal and I and it’s me doing it.
Jonathan Fields: [00:55:21] Mm. It’s almost like, um. This shall be. And who knows.
Joe Hudson: [00:55:29] Right? Yeah. Totally. Totally.
Jonathan Fields: [00:55:32] Which is and I agree with you, I think a lot of people who do astonishing things in the world somehow hold, like, find a way to hold on to both of those and to let go of all of it at the same time.
Joe Hudson: [00:55:42] Yeah.
Jonathan Fields: [00:55:44] Which sounds bizarre. Like if you’re listening, you’re like, my head is spinning right now. Yeah, I don’t get this. Like, like. And you and I love conversations like this, but I think sometimes people listen to that and they’re like, but what do I do? Yeah. Like what? Like, okay, so. So I get this. I’m kind of nodding along. Some of these things really make sense to me. Yeah. Um, what do we do with this?
Joe Hudson: [00:56:07] Yeah. So the first thing in that question is, uh, it’s pretty ineffective. The the question, what do I do? Not entirely, but often ineffective because what it’s doing is it’s cutting off the understanding. Oh, I have this epiphany. If you’re listening to this, there’s some moment where you’re like, oh, yeah, what do I do about it? And so you’re not letting oh yeah. Actually register in your entire system. And and again, so it’s the idea is that you’re doing is going to be more important than your understanding. So that’s that’s one of the things. And so to actually allow the understanding to wash over you is one of the best things. The second thing that you and these are things you can do, the other thing you can do is just have gratitude for recognition. Like really allow yourself time to be deeply grateful for recognition that you have when you have it, because that like deepens that washing over and deepens the understanding as far as the. Humility goes. Well, there is the the the how to talk, how to react to the negative self-talk. That’s some very good action that you can take. Another great one is to allow yourself to feel a whole bunch of emotions. We have something called emotional inquiry that we can give you a link to if you’re interested. And that’s a really great way to feel into emotions with a lot of wonder. Um, so that’s a great thing that can be done. Um, the other thing that can be done is to. Let me think of a way to put this, which is um. You can notice that you are not you can literally. Oh, one way to do it is to notice that no thought you’ve ever had is yours and literally spend an hour noticing. Like I’m not deciding to have any of these thoughts, but the thoughts are arising. The other way to do it is semantically go to back to where the source of the thought is.
Jonathan Fields: [00:58:17] Described that for me, like what do you mean by that?
Joe Hudson: [00:58:20] It is not a good way to describe it. But if you sit down in a chair and you just watch your thought come up, go back to where it came from, so we can just do that for a minute. We all have tons of thoughts, so for a thought will come up in 30s. And you just cinematically go to where that thought arose from.
Jonathan Fields: [00:58:46] We say somatic theory saying where do I feel it in my body?
Joe Hudson: [00:58:50] Yeah, yeah. The physical sensation of where that thought came from.
Jonathan Fields: [00:58:54] And how does it help me?
Joe Hudson: [00:58:59] Do it for a long time? Yeah, I think it’s great. I think it’s great. My and my response would be do it and find out. Because here’s one of the things that I’ve learned is that when I discover something. So my I had huge authority issues when I was younger. And because I have authority issues, I didn’t believe any teacher. I couldn’t really allow for teachers in my system for a long time, but I really wanted to learn. So I would listen and then I would say, hey, let’s test it out, let’s see if they’re right. So I would test everything. And in that process of testing everything, what I realized is I would do something, I’d do an experiment and it would quote unquote, work. Oh my gosh, if I loved my emotions. Wow. They changed. The resistance was gone and oh my gosh. And but then I started loving my emotions to get rid of them and it stopped working. So what you discover is that oftentimes when in self-discovery, if you’re doing something to change your emotional experience. It stops working. Or if you do something to get you somewhere, it stops working. If you’re meditating to get somewhere, it is far less effective than if you’re meditating just to enjoy the hell out of meditation. And so if I give like the destination of this thing when I’m scared will happen, is it somebody will hold that destination in their head and not discover what happens naturally, right?
Jonathan Fields: [01:00:24] Which kind of defeats the whole point of it.
Joe Hudson: [01:00:25] Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, yeah.
Jonathan Fields: [01:00:27] Um, there’s a certain faith amount of faith. Yeah, that comes with this invitation.
Joe Hudson: [01:00:33] Certain humility.
Joe Hudson: [01:00:34] Yeah, yeah.
Jonathan Fields: [01:00:36] Early in the conversation, you you also brought up this notion of calling. Yeah. In this context. In the context of humility. Um, tell me more about the relationship.
Joe Hudson: [01:00:51] At some point, there was a recognition that if I didn’t follow the calling, It was really painful. It’s very hard for me to describe what exactly calling is. So if this is frustrating for somebody, I totally understand. Um, but I there’s a knowing that, oh, this is what I’m meant to do. I might not want to do it. I might rail against it. But there’s a knowing. Oh, this is the thing that I’m supposed to do. And I realized if I didn’t do it because I don’t want to do that, it always was. Got more and more uncomfortable until I did it. And when you realize that, then there’s a choicelessness in it. You don’t get the choice of doing this thing or not doing this thing. You get a choice of having to be more and more uncomfortable, or not having to be more and more uncomfortable. There’s really no choice. There’s really no choice in that. And when you recognize that, and that’s a deep form of humility because it’s it’s a choiceless life.
Jonathan Fields: [01:01:53] Mm. Folks aren’t going to like that.
Joe Hudson: [01:01:56] They sure aren’t. And I think. And for.
Jonathan Fields: [01:01:59] Massive determinism in a lot of ways.
Joe Hudson: [01:02:01] Yeah, it’s not quite. It’s not quite the same way. Meaning that’s a great, great thought process. It’s not quite the same way, because you can’t get to the place of calling until you realize you do have choice.
Jonathan Fields: [01:02:13] Mhm.
Joe Hudson: [01:02:14] So until you realize, until you realize like, oh, I can shape the world into what I want to shape the world into, at least somewhat that I can say no to my boss, that I can not accept this abuse from my husband, that I can not live in a societal standard that I’m supposed to live in, that I don’t have to follow this career path, and I don’t have to have 16 kids, or two kids and 2.5 kids at this age and live in this kind of a house until you realize that you actually have the freedom to do what you want. You can’t actually you’re not even you can’t even be aware of the calling. And then there’s a place where it’s. Oh, it’s all a gift. It’s also necessary to get to to to get to the place where it’s like, oh, this is a calling. So when the calling comes and you see it and you understand it, it includes all of that. It includes, oh, I’m being called to go and take action and do something in the world, which is going to require my determination, and it’s going to require my, my showing up in a way that’s uncomfortable for me sometimes. Sometimes it doesn’t. And, and it’s also going to require the recognition that it’s you’re not responsible for this, that it is a gift. And all of that requires a humility to get to the place of, I have a choice, but I don’t really have a choice that the oak tree doesn’t really have a choice. The dog doesn’t really have a choice. And I get we do have choice. So it’s like, again, it’s holding the dichotomy both at the same time. It is holding the. Empowerment of choice. And it’s holding the faith of non-choice. And if we can’t do both of them, then we’re still. Our little personalities are entrenched and digging in. And which is not the humility.
Jonathan Fields: [01:04:11] Do you feel like we all, if we allowed this space, if we acknowledge the if we acknowledge that that in so many ways we do have choice, we have agency. Um,
Joe Hudson: [01:04:23] Yeah.
Jonathan Fields: [01:04:24] Which sort of seeds? Um, the possibility of something resembling what we might call calling.
Joe Hudson: [01:04:32] Yeah.
Jonathan Fields: [01:04:33] To emerge. Yeah. And as you said, like, if we can’t even get to the fact that, like, we have any sense of agency or choice, then there’s no space for and understanding calling to emerge like we can’t, because that would imply agency.
Joe Hudson: [01:04:48] Yeah. That’s really well said.
Jonathan Fields: [01:04:49] You know. Um. Do you believe that we all have that thing inside of us? Because I think a lot of people are probably say to themselves, because I don’t know what it is. I never know what it is. I’m in the 40s, 50s, 60s, 70s, whatever it may be. Yeah, or maybe you’re younger. Um, maybe. I just don’t know. Maybe that’s for other people.
Joe Hudson: [01:05:08] Then you wouldn’t walk. That’s the first calling. One of the first callings. Reaching, understanding where your hands are. These are all the calling. This is like the natural tug of evolution. It is the thing that allows the birds to know where their migratory paths are. It’s the thing that allows an oak tree. I get emotional thinking about it. It’s a thing that allows the the the oak tree, the acorn to know how to become an oak tree and respond to the light. It is. It is our birthright. We just have to create a ton of resistance to stop it. Which is where most. Which is what we do.
Jonathan Fields: [01:05:58] That’s how we live.
Joe Hudson: [01:05:59] Yeah.
Jonathan Fields: [01:06:00] And it sounds like the way you’re describing also is you don’t necessarily you’re not really describing from. And tell me if I’m getting this right. Like we’re all born with one singular calling and like or like it’s this one thing and like, that’s it. It’s like, no, there there could be a myriad of ways that we’re called in different contexts, different seasons, different ways, different parts of our lives. Right. And, and like, it’s not just this one universal thing. It’s just like it literally we’re being whispered to all the time. Yeah. All day, every day for the entirety of our lives. And, and part of the work is to create the space to hear the whispers.
Joe Hudson: [01:06:36] Right. And you can only hear it now. Like, sometimes I get an idea where it’s headed, but it’s generally like this right now. This thing is clear. I have to do this thing right now. And so I see people get lost a lot looking for their purpose or their calling, as if it’s an abstract thing. And then I’ll know what to do from this point forward. It doesn’t work like that. It’s, you know what to do at this point forward because you took the next step on the path.
Jonathan Fields: [01:07:04] Yeah, I.
Joe Hudson: [01:07:05] Don’t know what to do at the fork until I get to the fork.
Jonathan Fields: [01:07:09] I love that, um, it feels like a good place for us to come full circle as well in this conversation. So in, uh, in this container of Good Life Project,
Joe Hudson: [01:07:18] Yeah.
Jonathan Fields: [01:07:19] If I offer up the phrase to live a good life.
Joe Hudson: [01:07:21] Yeah.
Jonathan Fields: [01:07:21] What comes up?
Joe Hudson: [01:07:24] Be yourself. The authenticity of you is the good life.
Jonathan Fields: [01:07:31] Thank you.
Joe Hudson: [01:07:32] You’re welcome. Pleasure to be with you.
Jonathan Fields: [01:07:35] You as well.
Jonathan Fields: [01:07:38] Hey, before you leave, if you love this episode, safe bet, you’ll also love the conversation we had with Brene Brown about vulnerability, courage, and leadership transformation. You can find a link to that episode in the show notes. This episode of Good Life Project was produced by executive producers Lindsey Fox and Me, Jonathan Fields. Editing help by, Alejandro Ramirez, and Troy Young. Kristoffer Carter crafted our theme music, and of course, if you haven’t already done so, please go ahead and follow Good Life Project in your favorite listening app or on YouTube too. If you found this conversation interesting or valuable and inspiring, chances are you did because you’re still listening here. Do me a personal favor. A seven second favor. Share it with just one person. I mean, if you want to share it with more, that’s awesome too. But just one person even. Then invite them to talk with you about what you’ve both discovered to reconnect and explore ideas that really matter. Because that’s how we all come alive together. Until next time, I’m Jonathan Fields signing off for Good Life Project.